The Fall of Reason

This chapter puts Pyrrho and Aenesidemus’ instability thesis and meteorology to the test. This first test is that put forward by one of their contemporaries: Plato. The overall strategy of Plato’s critique of any thesis of instability is to show the impossibility of making any true statement about any object that undergoes a ceaseless flux. Not unlike with Aristotle, reality must, for Plato, enjoy some degree of stability, for otherwise nothing would make sense. The same goes with time: to make sense of it, we need a punctuality and/or a continuum as well as a scheme (e.g. an arrow). What Pyrrho and Aenesidemus show is that however much reality and time need to be parcelled and directed in order to be made comprehensible, such acts are the result of human reason arriving too late. It is the lateness of reason that provides Aristotle with his partitioning of reality and Plato with his critique of ceaseless flux. Pyrrho and Aenesidemus’ fragments challenge theses by proposing a meteorological way of “apprehending” reality and time that avoids the monopoly of reason and its incurable tardiness.